Stringer and the Lost Tribe

by Lou Cameron

  Stringer stood with them to watch the silvery stuff fall drop by drop into a steel flask a bit larger than a milk bottle. He saw there were others nearby, waiting to be filled or toted out to the freight wagons. He knew that while a strong man could pack a full flask of mercury on one shoulder, it was just about impossible to keep on one’s feet packing half a flask, since even that much of the infernally heavy liquid metal, sloshing back and forth inside, hit either end of the flask like a sledgehammer.

  Knowing the Celtic sense of humor, Stringer was braced for one of them to coyly suggest such a chore for a greenhorn to try. But nobody did. Trevor had already shown he was a serious gent about industrial safety. So, having seen about all there was to see, they left the smelter, swung around a massive pile of already roasted tailings, and headed back to town.

  Stringer pointed back over his shoulder with his thumb and observed, “You sure wind up with a heap of paler pebbles, once you cook the juice out of it. Have you considered using some of it for paving? These dirt roads all around will get muddy as hell betwixt now and next summer, you know.”

  Trevor nodded but said, “Spent cinnabar is almost as hard and sharp-edged as broken glass, look you. Besides that, it’s Porter’s job to see to such matters. He’s welcome to all the tailings he wants. We have more of it further up the slope, you see. Every now and again we have to clear away the pile beside the smelter. It takes up much more room broken up and baked than it ever did in the mountain, look you.”

  Stringer said he’d noticed. They entered the saloon together and had drinks with Porter, Watson, and a few other company men who didn’t seem to have anything better to do. Then Trevor said he meant to go home and change his pants. He warned some gents seated at a table that there’d be fire in the hole before school let out and that he expected them to muck a few tons each before they knocked off for serious drinking. They called him Taffy, too, as he strutted out like a pouter pigeon in his torn pants.

  Stringer told the smiling Porter, “I know mining men call Welshmen Taffy, but he does seem to take himself more seriously than the men who work under him seem to.”

  Porter chuckled fondly. “Nobody could take old Taffy Trevor as seriously as he takes himself. But he’s a good old boy, under his bluster. They all know he looks after them like a clucking mother hen. Somebody has to cluck at hard-rock men, you know. Left to themselves they live dangerously.”

  Stringer said he’d noticed that. He didn’t mention the open dynamite being treated so casually. That was Trevor’s concern, and Porter had enough on his plate for now.

  Stringer finished his beer and left. Nobody seemed to care. He untethered the buckskin and rode it up the valley to the Gores’ camp. The older man wasn’t there. His daughter, Nancy, said he’d left for the county seat in a huff, albeit aboard a pony, to get an injunction from the courthouse allowing him to dig up all the Indian bones he might want to.

  Stringer dismounted, smiling thinly as he told her, “I can see he’s a stubborn man. He must not believe in any Yana that ain’t dead if he’s riding that far through Indian country all alone.”

  She dimpled and said, “Oh, he took Johnny Conner and Uncle Jake with him. Granny Bear and I are here alone for now, and you’re invited for supper, if you like.”

  He glanced up at the sun, saw he’d missed noon dinner and had a few hours to wait for supper, and said, “I’d be proud to take some grub off your hands later, ma’am. Meanwhile, if your Granny Bear is that Indian cook who served me breakfast, I’d sure drink any coffee she has handy.”

  The willowy blonde called out, and the old Indian gal stuck her head out of a tent to glare at Stringer while the white lady ordered her in another lingo entirely. When Nancy turned back to Stringer and waved him to the al fresco table set up the same as before, Stringer asked her with a thoughful frown if she talked that way at home as a rule.

  Nancy sat him down, took a seat across from him, and explained. “I know a few words of a lot of dialects. Granny Bear is Paiute. She’s been with us for years, but she just can’t seem to learn much English. Uncle Jake is Shasta and Dutch, I think. They don’t get along too well. Uncle Jake refuses to even say thank you in Paiute. Even Johnny Conners is willing to be that nice to the dear old woman.”

  Granny Bear came out to slam tin cups and a coffeepot down on the planking between them. When Nancy nodded and said, ‘Toki Wah.” Stringer didn’t have to ask her what that meant. The old gal shrugged and waddled back out of sight. Stringer could see Uncle Jake’s point. The least a fat, ugly old woman could do was smile back when folks were trying to be nice to her.

  When he commented on this, sipping coffee that was much nicer than the woman who’d made it, Nancy sighed and said, “Paiute are like that. They’ve been whipped so sullen, even by other Indians, that they just don’t seem to have any smiles left in them.”

  “Yep. Yana are a lot more cheerful.”

  Nancy sighed, “Let’s not start that again, Stuart. You know very well the Yana are extinct.”

  Stringer glanced at the sky again. Then he asked, “Would you be fair enough to admit even your father could be wrong if I managed to introduce you to some alive and almost well Yana?”

  She laughed. “Are you talking about the Diggers up in the surrounding hills? Thanks a lot! Even if they didn’t scalp us, how could you prove they were anything but plain old wandering Diggers?”

  “Proving it would be up to you. You just said you speak some Paiute. How about Shasta, Maidu, Miwok, Washo, and such?”

  “I know at least a few words in all the Sierra dialects, although Paiute and Washo really belong on the eastern slope. So what?”

  “So if you met any Sierra Indians you couldn’t savvy, you’d have to admit they had to be somebody else, wouldn’t you?”

  “I guess so. But nobody knows how the ancient Yana spoke, Stuart. We only know they existed because other tribes tell legends about them—and, of course, because they left distinctive artifacts for us to dig up.”

  “Look, Nancy, I can show you Yana using and even making such stuff only a few hours ride from here if you’re game to trust me about getting you back with all your hair.”

  She looked mighty hesitant, and he didn’t blame her. But he said, “Of course, if you’d rather just study dead Indians and textbooks for all the answers… well, who’s ever going to prove you and your stubborn old daddy wrong?”

  “All right. Let me gather some notebooks for my saddlebag. But if you get us both killed, Stuart MacKail, I’ll never speak to you again.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Neither of them spotted Joe Malliwah before he wanted them to. They weren’t supposed to to. When he finally appeared atop a ridge ahead of them, Nancy observed uncertainly, “That rider up there looks more like a cowboy than an Indian to me.”

  “Sometimes he acts one way and sometimes the other,” Stringer admitted. “Stay here while I ride up and explain you to him.”

  “You want me to stay here alone and unguarded? What if there are other Indians hidden in the chaparral all about us?”

  He smiled at her reassuringly. “I’m pretty sure there are. You won’t be unguarded. The Yana will surely stomp any snakes coming at you and your pony. They’re more timid then rude.”

  Then he spurred his own buckskin up through the scrub oak to join Joe on the ridge. As he reined in, the Indian cowboy said, “I see you’ve picked up a blond pony and a blond woman since the last time I saw you. Which one gives a man the best ride?”

  Stringer told him not to talk dirty and added, “She’s just a new convert, I hope. I’m not ready to trust her with the location of that lava tube your friends will be wintering in, but do you reckon you could arrange for her to have supper with some Yana in a safer place?”

  Joe said he might be able to, given a sensible reason. So Stringer gave him a terse account of his more recent adventures down in Quicksilver.

  Joe grimaced. “You sure have been busy. I savvy how introducing that saltu
gal to extinct Indians might improve her manners. But I don’t think we ought to tell my more bare-ass kin about her daddy’s grave robbing.”

  Stringer insisted he’d just said that and headed back down the slope to rejoin Nancy while Joe rode the other way to wrangle them an invitation to supper.

  Stringer explained the situation to the white girl, leaving out a few things she had no call to fret about, and added, “We may as well dismount and rest our ponies. I can’t say where old Joe will be riding, and even when he gets there, some Indians are sort of long-winded.”

  She hesitated until she saw him get down and tether his pony to a bush with succulent leaves. Then she got down herself. “I wish I shared your trust in Diggers,” she said. “So many behave like thieving beggers when they don’t throw rocks and run off sneering at you.”

  Stringer found a better bush to tether her pony to than the scrub oak she’d started to choose before he told her, “For a lady in the Indian-studying business, you sure don’t know much about real Indians, no offense. White tramps who skulk about the edges of a camp or settlement are hardly credits to our race, either. What would you say if some Indian scientist called a hobo or a horse thief a typical Caucasian?”

  She smiled uncertainly and protested, “It’s not the same. All the poor Indians have been degraded by our expanding civilization. The Noble Savage was before my time. They were mopping up the last really wild Apache while I was still a little girl in pigtails. You forget I’ve been on many a field trip with my father since then. I’ve yet to see a really wild Indian, even in so-called Indian country.”

  He wasn’t ready to argue that point yet. They found a fallen log to sit on, with Stringer keeping his gun facing out and handy, of course, and as they watched their ponies browse he asked her to tell him more about that Professor Robbins her father seemed so upset by.

  She said, “Oh, Nat Robbins is a nice enough man, I guess. He and Father only fuss about scientific methods. Although, of late, they’ve gotten pretty vitriolic about each other’s methods in their published papers. Father, as you know, believes in hard evidence one can weigh and measure. Old Nat takes the position that linguistic clues and tribal legends can establish the way various tribes are, or were, related. Some of his notions seem rather farfetched to Father. Nat, on the other hand, claims a potsherd or an arrowhead can’t tell you much if you don’t know who might have made it or when.”

  Stringer nodded. “It reminds me of the Great Dinosaur Feud between Cope and Marsh. They came to blows about which big lizards ate what, and what they must have looked like with their hides on. It seems to me the scientific method would be to use all the data anyone could find. But then, I’m not a scientist, so I don’t have to worry about any pet notions of my own.”

  He began to roll a smoke as he added thoughtfully, “Cope and Marsh actually sabotaged each other’s dinosaur digs, and each accused the other of pegging shots on occasion. Have your father and his rival, Robbins, carried their study of wild Indians to that point?”

  She shook her head a bit insistently as she told him, “Good heavens, they’re both gentlemen. They used to like each other socially. I fear Father was first to refer to Nat as a young whippersnapper in a paper refuting Nat’s claim that the Shoshone and Aztec were both related to the Hopi. Nat’s somewhat younger than Father, you see, even though he holds a full professorship in anthropology.”

  Stringer sealed his cigarette paper with his tongue and said, “Robbins may be right about all those tribes speaking a similar lingo. The Paiute talk something like that, too, according to some article I’ve read.”

  She wrinkled her pert nose and told him, “It was probably an article by Nat Robbins, then. Father thinks it’s wrong to write scientific articles for popular publications.”

  Stringer lit his smoke before he asked, “How come? Doesn’t the general population have a right to read about Indians? Lord knows enough pure pap has appeared about redskins biting the dust in pulp magazines about a West that never was. I should think a more informed account of real Indians would be good for all of us to read.”

  She shook her head. “Science is above the heads of most laymen. Even if it weren’t, Nat’s hasty conclusions strike Father more as an attempt to grab publicity than an attempt to educate anyone. I like Nat better, but I have to go along with Father that he tends to make wild stabs. Every language borrows words from others. Anyone fluent in both English and Paiute can see their word for medicine, ‘pow-wah,’ is simply the English word ‘power’ picked up from some early squaw man.”

  Stringer took a drag on his smoke and observed gently, “Few western tribes use the word ‘squaw.’ It’s an eastern Indian term they sort of resent, having heard it applied to their women by disrespectful white men. I think the Yana word for woman would be ‘marimee.’”

  She turned to him triumphantly to declare, “You just proved my point! A lot of natives exposed to English use ‘Mary’ as the word for a wife. Or perhaps it derives from ‘marry me’!”

  He shrugged and said, “You’ll get a chance to ask before sundown. I see old Joe Malliwah is back. He once told me his name means ‘wolf,’ by the way. I’d love to hear you twist ‘wolf’ or, heck, ‘lobo,’ into ‘Malliwah.’ ”

  She couldn’t. They mounted their ponies and rode up to join Joe on the ridge. Nancy seemed surprised when Joe held out a big brown hand to her and said, “Howdy, ma’am. You’re just in time for supper.”

  But it wasn’t quite that simple. Joe led them high and low through woods and chaparral, until even Stringer was having a hard time figuring out just where they might be. Finally they wound up in a small mountain meadow in front of a summer lodge the Yana had obviously tossed fresh branches on top of in their honor.

  They got down and ducked inside. Nancy was obviously ill at ease at first. But she knew enough to act polite, and as the old Yana men and women inside, with no kids to get in the way, warmed up to her attempts to talk to them in Paiute, she began to look more relaxed and confused at the same time.

  With Joe translating, she asked if it was all right for her to take notes. The grave old chief Stringer had met before said he’d just love to see some saltu medicine. So Nancy wrote down that majapah—their word for “chief”—likely derived from Major Poppa, and she said so to Stringer.

  But once they’d been served some acorn mush and deer stew, with implements and in basket saucers that didn’t sound at all like any lingo she knew, Nancy began to agree grudgingly that whatever these folk were, they couldn’t be members of any tribe she was familiar with.

  She knew enough about Indians in general to accept seconds and act as if she enjoyed their cooking. It couldn’t have been too tough for her. The Yana had gone out of their way to provide a decent meal, and she said so, sincerely.

  Then, as the men smoked, Nancy commenced to compile a shorthand glossary of Yana words by pointing at things and getting the Yana to giggle at her. When the old majapah and an old woman called the same bone spoon different names, she turned to Joe for help.

  The cowboy explained, “When Yana are little, living with their mommas in the family wowi—this here is a wowi—they talk woman-talk. Once a boy’s been initiated into the watah-gurwah, or men’s clubhouse, he learns new words for everything, so he can talk man-talk. It sounds complicated unless you’re used to it. But everyone knows both words for everything, in case someone gets drunk and mixed up. Sometimes a man calls something by its woman-name as a joke. Some such jokes can get sort of dirty. So let’s say no more about it, ma’am.”

  She wrote that down and exclaimed, “Heavens, the Slavic languages of the Old World do much the same thing. Men and women speaking, say, Russian use different grammar.”

  Joe raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying my kin speak Russian, ma’am?”

  Nancy laughed. “No. But both languages may well have picked the odd construction up from some Asiatic race long ago. Other Indo-European languages have less confusing grammars than Slavic, and it�
�s no secret the American Indian once lived in Siberia.”

  She turned to Stringer to add, “Nat Robbins says he can relate most Indian dialects to no more than a handful of Siberian ancestral tongues. He’d have a field day if he could work with these people! I confess that all I can work out is that they share many words with Shasta, some with Maidu, and some with no dialect I know anything about.”

  Stringer suggested that in that case she’d best take down some more. So she did, nodding with understanding when the word for something sounded familiar and grinning like a kid on Christmas morning when she found a word entirely unexpected. Then she spotted a stone meat chopper one old Yana lady was almost sitting on and asked if she could take a closer look at it. The Yana woman handed it over with a curious look, since to her it was simply what she’d used to cut up some deer meat, and they all looked surprised when Nancy held it up to the light and exclaimed, “We’ve found flintwork just like this down by Quicksilver in prehistoric burials.”

  Stringer said, “No you haven’t. I tried to tell you and your father the Yana only moved in here a generation or so back. They used to live over on the far side of Mount Lassen. Ain’t that right, Joe?”

  The English-speaking Indian nodded. “Hoksah. There was too much gold over that way for our people to live in peace. I sure wish they hadn’t found that damned mercury. How were we supposed to know what that paint-rock was good for to you saltu?”